Day Zero – Count Your Blessings

This is the Day Zero of the 7-Day Gratitude Challenge – the prep day. Are you ready to start? We sure are!

We have two tasks for you today.

1. Start a Gratitude Journal

A gratitude journal is a diary where you will record the things you’re grateful for and the things you’re doing – during this challenge and, hopefully, after it.

It’s important to record these things. A thought you have can be a great, positive thought, but it can be forgotten in a second or within a day; when you write it down, it makes you focus on it more and, as you keep filling your journal with all the things you’re grateful for, it becomes your personal library, a shield of positive energy that will keep the negative thoughts away.

You can keep the journal in any form you like: take an empty notebook and just call it “My Gratitude Journal” (but choose a nice looking one, one that you’ll love to look at), you can keep it in your computer (as a Word or PowerPoint document) or online – if you ever wanted to start a blog, here’s one good reason to do it! And of course, not to forget Pinterest 🙂

Just to give you a heads up – you’re probably going to love your journal so much that you will want to decorate it as you go, so think bigger than just writing! Here are some examples of what some gratitude journals look like:

Hopefully you won’t stop after this 7-day challenge – gratitude journals have been proven to change people’s lives for the better, and dramatically!

2. Take Ten Minutes and Write Down Ten Things You’re Grateful For

Think about the people around you, the things you have, circumstances that brought you where you are now. Think hard – and write them down. All the good things in your life, everything that made you a person that you are today, every big or small thing that makes you feel safe and happy…

We take too many things in our life for granted. Unlike many others, we have enough food, we have electricity, heck we have enough money to buy the device we’re using right now and to buy a coffee or sandwich. Some people don’t have that.

We all have at least one person who truly cares for us. We have roof over our head. We have some great relationships. We are alive.

Think about that – and write down at least ten things. If you can come up with more in ten minutes – please do! But don’t take more than 10 minutes now, it’ll be plenty of time later. Today is only to get you started.

An important note: don’t just write down “my health” – make a full sentence for each thing you’re grateful for, starting with “I am grateful for…”. If you can make it in 10 minutes, try to finish them with “… because…”.

It’s a reminder to you, so don’t hold back!

Tasks Summary

To sum it up, today you should:

Choose how you will keep your gratitude journal

Do some initial decorations

Count your blessings, at least ten of them, and write them down

We’ll make a round up post of most beautiful gratitude expressions when the Challenge is over – it’ll be during the first few days of the New Year, so keep your eyes on our Facebook page! See you tomorrow 🙂

And right now you could share one thing you’re grateful for. Just write the first one that comes to mind!